Office Hours Hangout

HealthCare.gov is not unlike any other website – visitors expect it to just work. The problem is, when HealthCare.gov launched, it didn’t work. It was slow. It crashed. Users couldn’t get through the process. Simply put: it failed.

As online businesses prepare for the holiday shopping season, it is imperative for them to understand the amount of traffic their website can handle. We spent last week’s Google+ Office Hour Hangout with Ragnar Lonn and Robin Gustafsson of Load Impact, a Cloud Tools Marketplace partner, to discuss their load testing tool and how it can help you prepare for high traffic events. Here are some highlights from the talk along with links to the part of the video that we discussed them. If you are looking for more information, I’ve embedded the video of the entire Hangout at the bottom of the post.

We’ve spent a lot of time talking about our different server and storage products, but this past week on the Rackspace Google+ Office Hours Hangout we talked a little bit about Cloud Sites, our platform for hosting websites and blogs. Check out some of the highlights below (linked to the point in the video that it was discussed) or watch the full video of the Hangout at the bottom of the post.

This past week we had a special Cloud Office Hours, where we got to talk with Erik Carlin, the director of product in charge of our new Performance Cloud Servers. We recently made these 100 percent SSD and 10Gb Ethernet machines available in our data centers and have had tremendous interest from customers. I cover some of the highlights below, but this is going to be one Hangout that you don’t want to miss. Take a look at the entire video, embedded at the bottom of this post.

Brace yourself: the holiday shopping season is coming. If you are in the ecommerce industry you must be prepared for the influx of seasonal traffic as more and more people begin to shop online. We focused this Hangout on information we hope viewers will find beneficial as they prepare for one of the busiest times of the year. In addition to posting some of the highlights from the show below, I have embedded the entire video of the Hangout at the bottom of this post.

I know that it may be hard to believe, but the holiday shopping season is fast approaching. If you have an ecommerce site, or have aspirations to set up an ecommerce solution, you need to start preparing now.

This past week we got to take a sneak peek into the newest home for Geekdom, the place where startups are born, out in San Francisco. Started almost two years ago in San Antonio, the hometown of Rackspace, Geekdom has become the largest co-working space in Texas with 45,000 square feet of makers, inventors and entrepreneurs. The San Francisco location opened up a couple of months ago, so we wanted to chat with some of the folks who worked over there on the West Coast.

This past week we had a special Cloud Office Hours, where we got to interview some of the engineers behind the Rackspace Deployment Services. We recently launched this service in our Cloud Control Panel, enabling users to automatically deploy infrastructure for popular apps, frameworks and building blocks of the cloud using tried-and-true best practices. I cover some of the highlights below, but this is going to be one Hangout that you don’t want to miss and I encourage you to watch the entire video embedded at the bottom of the post.

Last week during our Cloud Office hours, we covered modularity in the cloud, another one of the Pillars of Cloudiness. For the past several weeks we have led discussions based on the blog series created by Wayne Walls about each of these pillars. You can read about some of the highlights below as well as watch the full video on modularity at the end of the post.

Last week during our Cloud Office hours, we talked about another one of the Pillars of Cloudiness, horizontal scaling. These hangouts have been inspired by the blog series created by Wayne Walls, and I would encourage you to check it out if you are getting started in the cloud. Some of the highlights from the hangout are listed below, and you can also watch the full video on horizontal scaling at the end of the post.